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What's He Building in There?

The American writer James Salter wrote: “There is no complete life. There are only fragments.” The inception of my novel, The Killing Moon, began in fragments, howls of anguish, synchronicities, transient moments of clarity and the roiling, boiling clouds of fog, cries, whispers, the pleasure of a metaphor that finally worked, joie de vivre and a Keatsian melancholy. To steal outright from the great Scottish writer George Mackay Brown: The novel stretched like a child and rubbed its eyes on light.

The first image that ascended from the dark underland of my unconscious was of a young boy trapped inside a chicken coop. As happens with most of my stories they are a mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, and the frustration that exists between these two, at least this is how narrative “happens” for me. In truth, this image got into me because a friend of mine once told me about how his young son liked to go into their chicken coop and sit with the hens. And so the telling of his story became the seed of my own and entered the “realm of mythology,” while making my very own memories, myths, and metaphors.


When you arrive at the very bottom, you will hear knocking from below.


As Rilke so rightly knew: “We are the bees of the invisible. Frenziedly we gather the honey of the visible, to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” Once the story had me in its grip, or as Jonathan Carroll says, “write what bites you,” the secret of this particular beehive started making sense on the imaginative and literary level, which I’ve found is never a flat perspective. (My use of the bee metaphor is no coincidence: Bees figure prominently in The Killing Moon.) Stories pass through us all like ghost particles, and some stay, others pass on. Well, this story stayed, I’m glad to say.


Il faut toujours travailler.


I remember listening to that unforgettable TED Talk with Elizabeth Gilbert and how she retold that wonderful story about the musician Tom Waits (a favourite of mine) who was driving along the freeway in LA and a song came to him and he was like, not now, damn it, I’m not ready for this now, can’t you just wait until I’m at home in front of my swordfish trombone! There’s nothing you can do when a story grabs you and won’t let you go….


Trust me, I’m telling you stories.


I could go on writing about the origins of this story and its process, but you know what, I think you’re likely to drop the thread and wander off, thinking at this point it would be more interesting to meet the minotaur.


I’m reading Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, which happens to be one of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a long time, especially the way he writes about the beauty and the damage to nature, this profound awareness of both suffering balanced with generous life. A moment of true ataraxia. Maybe eudaimonia at the stunde null. I don’t know, but I love his work. In it he meets this young scientist named Merlin Sheldrake who is studying the life under our feet, in particular fungi and the hyphae that webs the earth below us. I love how Merlin wants to talk about “the frothy mad fuck-ups and happenstance and false starts” of science. What he wrote really go into my “underland.” I think writers can have a habit of being crown-shy (I know I can), of not wanting to discuss or share anything beside the book. But I wonder if that’s wrong. Not wrong morally, of course, but just plain manipulative to some false end. The writing of a book is so much more than just the writing, it’s really everything else that goes into the making of a story, about which writers barely say anything. Which is not to say that I’m going to tell you my entire life story here, but I want to give you “fragments” of my life that went into and out of this novel. But how to begin to talk about all those “mad fuck-ups and happenstances and false starts”?


A ghost of a world lay down on a world.


It all begins really with love, because everything begins with love, and it will outlive us, as the sometimes dour English poet wrote. Love for Nitasia, my daughters Gwen and Vienna, love and grief over the death of our baby son. Deaths and entrances. An abundance of life in loss. A love of words, language, stories, Wales, where I was born. Sometimes you’ve got to “dig for fire” as the Pixies sing. (And, yes, music is not a coincidence, either, as you will soon see.) What other “spots of time”? God, there are so many. Tart green apples, Dubliner cheese, and potatoes from the rich soil of another’s garden. Whiskey, sea, sun, snow drifts, sea smoke, the injured barred owl, coyotes raising hell in the night. Bees at the high-bush blueberries, so thick, you can’t pass through them. The rooster killed by the neighbour’s dog, the cockerel’s red coxcomb bright and menacing, his wattles battle-red, but the dog killed him anyway. It’s all there, every moment, every particle of time, meshed together, springing loose and then knitting back together again. Everything and nothing, like the abundance of life in a little plot of earth. It all enters the narrative in some form and gets transformed, as Ovid knew so well.


Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies.


And music. This novel wouldn’t have made it without music. Some things are just meant for each other, like bread and cheese, Morrissey and Marr. My novel includes a soundtrack, the music I listened to while writing and editing, procrastinating and wildly imagining what was to come next in the story. They are its “sound and vision.” The music wasn’t predetermined, songs either found a way to get under the record player’s needle or else my fingers were guided to my CD collection. They are not in any particular sequence (except for the final Bauhaus track), because I wanted to leave that up to the reader to shape their own soundtrack when it comes to reading The Killing Moon, and what songs will help them to further “see” the novel.


What’s he building in there? What the hell is he building in there?


Robert Macfarlane writes “We are often more tender to the dead than to the living.” This troubled me when I read it because The Killing Moon is set in the past, in the twilight of the Third Reich, and while I was trying to equally say something about this historical moment, I was equally trying to transcend it with metaphors, myths, the fantastical, the surreal, the weird. I imagined something else. “Ruins, for me, are the beginning” the German artist Anselm Kiefer has said. And just as he works with ash and lead, shards of glass and battered books that evoke war-ravaged wastelands, he adds a lyricism into the violence of his creations. In my own way, I have tried to do the same thing in The Killing Moon, but with a young boy and his father who make a perilous odyssey across war-torn Europe to save the boy’s mother from the Erlking, a menacing spirit out of myth who has been given eternal life in death and destruction, and, yet, life opens up before these characters like a door into the dark….

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